Step into the life and times of George Forster, a remarkable young naturalist, writer and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world – and whose radical ideas about humanity, equality and freedom challenged the dominant worldviews and ideologies of eighteenth-century Europe.  From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. At just ten years old, he became a botanist when he accompanied his irascible father on an expedition to Russia and at the age of seventeen he became the assistant naturalist and draughtsman on Cook’s second voyage. The Resolution set sail in 1772 and ventured deep into the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific – including New Zealand, Tahiti, and Easter Island. A gifted observer, linguist, artist, and writer, Forster studied the indigenous people and diverse cultures of the world without prejudice. He returned with a deep-seated belief in the equality of all humans. He saw unity behind our diversity – a complex tapestry woven from the many shades of human lives. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and human rights and against empire, racism and slavery. He admired strong and educated women, and was proud to have daughters – even accepting his wife’s affairs and independence. Pulled into the vortex of the French Revolution, he became a leader of the short-lived Republic of Mainz, before being declared an outlaw in Germany and forced into exile in Paris during the Reign of Terror. 

At the heart of The Traveller is Forster’s quest to find what connects us rather than what sets us apart. Vivid, engaging and drawing on Forster’s rich correspondence almost entirely unpublished in English, The Traveller recounts an extraordinary, adventurous and passionate life largely forgotten by history – a man whose ideas belonged to the future.

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Reviews

“One of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of … Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler, a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve … The Traveler thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this “liberal thinker far ahead of his time” – New York Times

“Andrea Wulf’s splendid biography rescues a dizzying life … Forster’s life provides the contented reader with uninterrupted fascination. Reading Andrea Wulf’s splendid new book The Traveller, you wonder whether she has chanced on the ideal biographical subject … His was, frankly, an almost indecently interesting life story. How many lives encompass Maori tribes, Easter Island, Habsburg Austria and the French Revolution? Wulf, the author of acclaimed books on Alexander von Humboldt and the German Romantics, tells it all with the expected panache” – The Times, Book of the Week

“A revelatory account of the life of George Forster, whose rejection of racial hierarchies stood out amongst his peers … The richness of Wulf’s research – drawn from Forster’s personal correspondence, diaries and essays, as well as those of his contemporaries – injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs. It also allows the author to move from closely narrating the events of Forster’s life, as if perched on his shoulder, to inhabiting his interior voice as he experiences the world in real time” – The Guardian

“Andrea Wulf’s magnificent book … George’s efforts to adapt to life and work at sea, as laid out in “The Traveler,” are as exciting as anything in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson” – John Banville in the Wall Street Journal

“Wulf’s biography is filled with marvellous details …this is a fascinating book about a fascinating life” – Financial Times

“Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography … in this lucent, affectionate retelling of his life, Andrea Wulf makes a convincing case for George as a thinker who has too long been dismissed or ignored” – Literary Review

“A rich new biography…George Forster — the assistant naturalist who circumnavigated the globe with Captain Cook at just 17 — emerges not as a mere chronicler of discovery but as the primary intellectual ancestor of our contemporary ecological and humanitarian conscience…In our own fractured age, George Forster’s recovered legacy is a vital reminder of what we stand to lose in our artificial partitioning of the world. What a contemporary described as “cosmopolitanism personified,” he felt no allegiance to a single nation but to humanity itself. “The Traveler” is an invitation to step out of our studies and experience the world — with its attendant risks and rewards. In rescuing Forster from the margins of history, Wulf offers us a thinker who understood, long before any of us could, that we are, despite appearances, part of “a system of divine concordance” – Boston Globe

“I loved this book. It’s a biography of the naturalist/travel writer/revolutionary/Enlightenment man George Forster, who led what was probably one of the most eventful lives of the entire eighteenth century” – James Marriott, Cultural Capital

“One of the most significant naturalists and travel writers of the age… [Forster was] prescient … original … exemplary … a remarkable, compellingly humane, figure” – The Spectator

“A radically independent mind forged by travel, tolerance and turmoil. But above all for Wulf, he presages our present-day attitudes to global difference, race and diversity … The great achievement of The Traveller is to make Forster resonate with the present day” – TLS

“Wulf amply restores [George Forster’s] stature as a brilliant mind. A stirring, empathetic portrait. . . . His curiosity, tolerance, and humaneness contrasted sharply with the perspective of his Eurocentric contemporaries” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review

‘Wulf’s transfixing portrait of George Forster … Readers will be deeply moved by Wulf’s spirited honoring of this perpetual outsider and galvanizing writer’ – Booklist, starred review

“Scintillating new book” – Bookseller 

‘Bestselling historian Wulf offers a revelatory biography of the little remembered but brilliant polymath and naturalist George Forster … Readers will be rapt by this immersive recreation of an intellectual awakening’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review

Advance Praise

“A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself I loved it!.” – Tom Holland, historian and host of The Rest is History

“A book belonging to the small, splendid canon of writers unafraid to render fact with feeling – a work of devotion and rigor celebrating the courage to look past the horizon of an era’s givens and refuse to take the figments of a culture for facts” – Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian

“With her beautiful, sensitive, impressively researched biography of George Forster, Andrea Wulf brilliantly narrates the novelistic life of a uniquely curious scholar at a pivotal moment in Western Civilization, a man who embodied the notion that travel breeds empathy. Forster’ unquestioning love for his fellow human being, as recounted by Wulf, is a much-needed antidote to the vitriol that courses through present times” – Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth

“The dauntless Andrea Wulf has gone adventuring, and returned with this enthralling account of young, nomadic George Forster. Her superb narrative shimmers with scholarly detail and magnificently sustains the ‘breathless exhilaration’ of his journeys, his extraordinarily liberal and observant mind and the intense emotional drama of his life. A combination of panoramic travelogue and tender psychological study, animated at every point by Wulf’s own travels and research, The Traveller is hypnotically successful and wonderfully restores George Forster as a major historical figure of early European Romanticism.” – Richard Holmes, author of Age of Wonder

“Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment.  With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the global range of his curiosity, and the poignant wilderness of his family life.  This book is the memorial that he has long deserved.” – Neil MacGregor, author of Germany: Memories of a Nation

“As George Forster circumnavigates the globe, Wulf’s circumnavigates the Enlightenment mind in all its complexity, making for a doubly brilliant and breathtaking adventure” – Sue Prideaux, author of Wild Thing

“George Forster, a celebrity intellectual in his day, was a man far ahead of his time. In this thrilling biography-cum-adventure story, Andrea Wulf deftly shows us how Forster’s far-flung wanderings inspired and nurtured one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment era.” – Hampton Sides, author of The Wide Wide Sea